Vice President, Engineering

NetBox Labs

About The Position

NetBox Labs is seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead day-to-day engineering execution, focusing on delivery, people development, and cross-team coordination. This role is crucial as the company transitions into a coordinated multi-team organization and evolves from a single product to a multi-product platform across SaaS and on-prem delivery models. A key priority for the company is a significant shift towards AI-native engineering practices, aiming to redefine how software is built. The VP of Engineering will be instrumental in accelerating this transformation, building a system that reliably turns strategy into shipped product. The role involves leading three engineering directors and their teams, owning the execution system, and ensuring quality and operational discipline. While not owning technical direction or product roadmap, the VP will partner closely with the CTO and VP of Product.

Requirements

Pragmatic operator with a bias toward progress, able to move work forward with incomplete information, limited resources, and evolving structure.
Experience building and running an engineering organization of 40-100 engineers.
Proven track record of owning outcomes, shipping products, improving delivery systems, and fixing execution failures.
Fluency in infrastructure and platform development, with the ability to engage credibly with engineers in these areas.
Experience as a manager of managers, developing leaders and holding them accountable.
Hands-on exposure to AI-assisted development and a clear point of view on its impact on engineering.
Ability to dive into the work, understand how things function, read code, ask sharp questions, and use modern tooling (including AI) to investigate and unblock teams.
Comfort making pragmatic progress without perfect structure, complete resourcing, or full alignment.
Ability to create momentum in imperfect conditions and tighten the system over time.
Understanding of hybrid SaaS + on-prem complexities, avoiding SaaS-only assumptions.
Experience managing multiple products on shared infrastructure, requiring deliberate system design.
Ability to distinguish what is working, what is fragile, and what needs to change in a mid-transformation environment.
Ability to push AI adoption where it creates leverage, constrain it where it creates risk, and build systems for comprehension and quality.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a company evolving from a single product to a multi-product platform.
Experience in a company operating across both SaaS and on-prem delivery models.
Experience standardizing shared foundations across teams while continuing to ship.
Experience with AI-native engineering transformation.

Responsibilities

Lead three engineering directors and their teams, ensuring leadership quality, team performance, and output.
Own the engineering execution system, including planning, cycles, release coordination, and cross-team execution.
Shape team boundaries and interfaces to facilitate rapid progress with minimal coordination overhead.
Clarify ownership, reduce cognitive load, and define clean contracts between teams.
Operationalize AI-native practices, including spec-driven development, AI-assisted implementation and review, and faster iteration cycles.
Own systems that protect velocity, such as CI/CD, testing strategy, reliability, and incident response.
Operationalize an AI accountability model, delegating work to AI systems with risk-based guardrails.
Own hiring, performance management, and leadership development.
Partner with the CTO on organizational design as the company scales.
Coach and support engineering directors, ensuring clarity of expectations and consistent follow-through.
Engage and challenge technical direction and strategy, but primarily focus on execution against it.
Partner closely with Product to understand and execute the product roadmap.